Morning Never Comes

January 2016

We did this room with 5 people. All family and friends. We successfully completed the room! Yay!

Challenge Level:

Lamya – The staff will tell you this is their easiest room and that’s definitely true, but it’s actually so easy that it doesn’t feel worth the 45 minutes or the $25. As is customary with most rooms, if you use your two hints, their almost nothing left to solve. I don’t mean to say this to imply that we finished this room in no time, because we didn’t. We really needed help. But I could honestly see a group completing this in 10 minutes. The puzzles are ok but there’s just not ENOUGH of them. One more thing: it’s becoming apparent that if you love escape rooms and do a lot of them, you need to do the easy ones first because after you build up a level of experience (I know, I’m making this really serious now), you will be disappointed with the easier rooms, like this one.

Jason– It’s time that I level with all of you out there. We have done a lot of escape rooms. We really enjoy them. At this point we don’t consider ourselves experts at escape rooms but we are veterans who have seen a lot of things. Sometimes you can’t see the nose in front of your face and this room was an example of that. The first puzzle took us 20 minutes and would have taken the average person about 5. We got stuck because we weren’t really looking at the clues that were around us. This was frustrating. When we did get stuck it’s very tough because the small room means that you’ll have one person trying to figure things out and 4 other people just kind of staring at the walls. It’s hard to keep a larger group engaged in this room.I will say that in hindsight this room is extremely easy. If a larger group was all working like a well-oiled machine they’d be done this room in 15 minutes. Almost to the point where you start wondering why you spend $25 on this room. I would only ever recommend this room to people who’ve never done one before and that’s mostly so they could feel what it’s like to successfully complete an escape room because this one is very very easy.

Creativity:

Lamya – This was a cool room. I always either walk into an escape room and feel one of two things: it’s time to work, or I’m exited to work! This room got be excited. It’s a neat setting (although I can’t say I haven’t seen almost an exact replica of it before), and the host portrayed his character very well. As for the puzzles, there are some really neat challenges that I’ve never seen before, and also one that we had seen before.

Jason– I will give Smartypantz credit where it’s due. This room has a very nice design to it and some of the puzzles were actually well thought out. There just weren’t enough of them. There are some nice sights and sounds to this room that help make you feel immersed in the experience. There’s nothing we haven’t really seen before in this room but there are a couple bells and whistles that are not bad.

Wow Factor:

Lamya – Nope. It’s just not there. When we completed the room, we were all still running around like crazy thinking there was more to be done. If you can’t wow a group when they successfully solve the room, then in my opinion, the room needs a little work.

Jason– I was not wowed by this room. I was frustrated at first but ultimately there is just not enough to make that meaningful of an experience for a user who has done even one or two escape rooms before.

Overall:

Lamya– As I’m sure you can tell by this point, I would certainly NOT recommend this room to anyone who’s done a few escape rooms. It’s not worth it. And if you’re looking for a starter room, we’ve recommended plenty of others, and even others at SmartyPantz are a better option.

Jason– Overall it is hard to recommend this room. I look at an experience like The Inheritance at Escape City which is similar to Morning Never Comes in terms of the size of the room and some of the puzzles involved but The Inheritance is a far superior room because it knows how to fill the space that they have. There are way more puzzles in that room and the challenge level gets appropriately harder as you move along. Morning Never Comes has very few puzzles to solve- so if you use your two clues given to you early on you can theoretically complete this experience in less than half the time. I use The Inheritance Room at Escape City as an example because both rooms are almost identical in size and yet the Inheritance has way more wow factor, more creativity, and more puzzles. First timers may find it more challenging but I would much rather fail at an interesting room with clever challenges than succeed in one that just looks ok but doesn’t really give me the full escape room experience. Remember that $25 x 5 people is $125 for a little over a half hour of not that much excitement. I admire what Smartypantz is trying to do with their escape rooms but I think that unless you were trying an escape room for the very first time with a group of other first timers you should skip Morning Never Comes.